Thursday, April 09, 2009

No Nukes Dupe

The president of the United States wants America to disarm: “Countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament.”…It is hard to imagine a more destructive goal…There is nothing moral, let alone realistic, about this goal….Imagine that the mayor of a large American city announced that it was his goal to have all the citizens of his city disarm…most people would regard this idea as...useless. There would be no way to ensure that bad people would disarm; and if the police disarmed, only bad people would have weapons….Naif in Chief, Dennis Prager, Frontpagemag.com, 4/7/2009

In Gordon Brown’s bankrupt, not-so-Great Britain, over the last decade of Labor Party rule it has become essentially illegal for a citizen to defend against a criminal. There have been countless cases of people who, surprised by a burglar coming through a window, and defending themselves with a cricket bat or – heaven forefend – a pistol, have ended up serving terms nearly equal to that meted out to the thug. The writer is familiar with this philosophy in New York, where self-defense is regarded as virtually criminal as well.

In the 1920s, the wise men (few women had any say in negotiations) of Europe, Britain, and Asia negotiated an assortment of disarmament treaties, essentially stripping their home countries of the means to defend themselves against a rogue nation that decided to arm itself for its own ends. By the late thirties, all of the negotiating parties were at war defending themselves against the rogue governments of Japan and Germany. The only real impact of the disarmament treaties was to considerably advance the art of concealing a far more powerful weapon in a form that met treaty obligations -- obligations that neglected to consider a) the possibility that even a signatory nation might ignore the treaty, and b) the likelihood that technology would rapidly outstrip the assumptions of a given treaty. Nothing better illustrated this than the conversion of the Japanese Navy to a fleet centered on the aircraft carrier.

Obliviousness to consequences of actions seems to typify this young administration, which has, in its three scant months, debased the currency; run up a two trillion dollar deficit over and above that left behind G W Bush; watered every pet-peeve garden in the Lefty paradise with the stimulus; promulgated an unconstitutional bill of attainder in Congress; is chatting amiably about negotiating with pirates from Somalia (who hold an American flagged merchant ship’s captain), with Iran (which is currently holding two American reporters hostage); and is going to saddle American industry (and its consumers) with the largest con game (cap and trade) in world history. Throwing in a few months’ work playing at the role of Neville Chamberlain is all of a piece, one supposes. The brilliant Thomas Sowell (anathema to Obama’s administration) sums it up well: “Barack Obama seems determined to repeat every disastrous mistake of the 1930s, at home and abroad. He has already repeated Herbert Hoover’s policy of raising taxes on high income earners, FDR’s policy of trying to micro-manage the economy, and Neville Chamberlain’s policy of seeking dialogues with hostile nations while downplaying the dangers they represent….moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past….Musings on the Age of Obama, Thomas Sowell, National Review, 4/7/09

Word is that there’s a sale on deck chairs at a furniture store in the District. Better get yours now, or a lifejacket.